[kilburn]

I know the "cool thing" these days is homebrew, but there's also MacPorts [1] which I would say it and aligns better with the "use a stable base + compile the latest things" approach.

MacPorts does not use the base system to compile the latest things on top. Instead, it creates a "parallel system" where everything is installed from MacPorts (and hence you all dependencies are continuously updated) for the "latest stuff" you install through MacPorts, while not touching the system stuff at all.

[1] https://www.macports.org/

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

What do you think of using pkgsrc on the MacIntosh?

https://www.pkgsrc.org

[kilburn]

I haven't tried it so I don't have an informed opinion.

All I can say in is that MacPorts has served me well for over 10 years at this point, with remarkably few issues (even after updating to newer MacOS releases).

A couple years ago I wanted to install restic, which had homebrew instructions but not a MacPorts package. I don't remember the details, but the installation through Homebrew failed. In the end, I got rid of Homebrew entirely and created a MacPorts package, which took me around 2 hours with no previous knowledge on MacPorts packaging. It was accepted upstream too :)

Since then it just hasn't seemed necessary to try out other package managers. MacPorts fills that need for me and I prefer to spend my time elsewhere.